Love, the Courage to Embrace Our Humanity: A Reparative Quest 

Templeton Prize Address by Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at the 2024 Templeton Prize Ceremony. The Stanley H. Kaplan Penthouse, New York, September 23, 2024.

The thought that I would win the Templeton Prize was the last thing on my mind when I got an email from Heather Dill, the president of The John Templeton Foundation, requesting a virtual consultation. I felt as overwhelmed as I did when I learned that I would be this year’s Templeton Laureate when I came in for the rehearsals earlier today and saw this room here at the Lincoln Centre. I’m filled with a great sense of gratitude after hearing Heather Dill’s heart-warming introduction and seeing all of you here tonight. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Templeton Foundation and its partners on the Templeton Prize. I feel honoured to receive this prize, and I am deeply humbled by the recognition of my work. 

I appreciate the congratulatory messages of Professor Wim de Villiers, the vice chancellor of Stellenbosch University, and Professor Tony Leysens, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and I am aware that you are speaking on behalf of the delegation from Stellenbosch University, which includes Professors Hester Klopper and Sibu Moyo, our university’s deputy vice chancellors. I owe a great deal to Stellenbosch University for giving me the opportunity to explore the issues at the heart of my research. 

Part of being overwhelmed by an honour as great as this one is that in the pursuit of this work, one never thinks of winning prizes—recognition of one’s work by one’s peers, whether though critique or praise, lecture invitations, etc.—yes. But for my work to be recognised with such high praise by the Templeton Prize is beyond what I imagined. Nonetheless, I see how the Templeton Prize pronouncement concerning the pursuit of knowledge—the quest for discovery—in the realm of research that leads to insights into the deepest questions about what it means to be human resonates with my own approach to my work. 

I would now like to turn to the questions that gave impetus to my research, and which have made it possible for me to be here tonight. Of course, the inspiration for my research is my country: its violent past, the historic moment of Nelson Mandela’s release, his political life, and his ability to inspire hope for a new future—a hope that has since faltered. The questions I continue to pursue began during the time I served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and as Hannah Arendt would say, as a reflection on events and encounters—the actual beginning of these questions I have pursued was my collaboration as a clinical psychologist with human rights lawyers who were defending anti-apartheid activists who had committed so-called “necklace murders” against black people accused of being police informants. But my interest crystalised during the years I served on the TRC following interviews with perpetrators, and with bystanders—beneficiaries of the violence of apartheid as Mahmood Mamdani refers to this group, or “the implicated subjects” of violent histories in Michael Rothberg’s parlance. 

Every idea that has the potential for fresh perspectives and knowledge originates from a contemplation of an encounter. Hannah Arendt articulates this point in her Essays in Understanding, and states the following: “I don’t think any thought process is possible without personal experience.” When I served on the TRC, I had the most startling interactions with men who had committed crimes from all political persuasions in South Africa’s violent past. At the time, forgiveness was a concept debated in philosophical texts mostly in abstract terms. Here, on the TRC, was an opportunity to witness it as action. Having been a child, an adult, and being involved in professional practice under apartheid, I found it fascinating that the expressions of remorseful regret by former apartheid operatives distinguished between the superficial witness-stand apologies on the one hand, and what I would consider to be “genuine” apologies on the other. These signs of remorse were also signs of hope—perhaps hope as a sacrament for the ones apologising, for those to whom the remorseful apologies were expressed, and to the audience of witnesses. 

Understanding remorse as a crying out to be readmitted into the realm of moral humanity, I began therefore to ask the question what is the appropriate response to the despair, to the pathos through which perpetrators show that they are moral subjects, capable of recognising their own hand in the victims’ reality? Can empathy and compassion be extended to include those who have been agents of violence?

If the goal is to transform relationships in a country whose past is marked by violent conflict, how can hate and vengeance be transcended? And how real can forgiveness be in the face of tragic pasts whose legacies and structural forces continue to reverberate transgenerationally? 

It’s easy to understand why many people find it difficult to accept the notion of forgiveness. To maintain some sort of moral compass, to hold on to some sort of clear distinction between what is humanely depraved, but conceivable, and what is simply off the scale of human acceptability, there is a desire—an inward emotional and mental pressure not to forgive. As if somehow forgiveness signals acceptability, and acceptability signals some amount, however small, of condoning. 

Yet how do you forgive, unless you can find claims of remorse credible? This is one set of questions—the how-can-we-know questions—and it has to do with verifiability. A second set has to do with the moral possibility itself—the psychological and epistemological possibility – of achieving authentic remorse in the wake of having performed “indescribable and undiscussable” crimes, to paraphrase Dan Bar-On. Both sets of questions are real, and both are legitimate. 

So, how do you find the remorse credible, unless you first attempt to understand why they committed the crimes? But how can you possibly comprehend, when the actions that are being described are so abhorrent? There is a desire to draw a line in the sand and to say “Where you have been I cannot follow you. Your actions can never be regarded as part of what it means to be human.” Yet not to forgive means closing the door to the possibility of transformation and change—it may also mean usurping the role of divine judgment. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave us language to face these questions. Thirty years after the inauguration of post-apartheid freedom, the questions that I have been examining surfaced again with a new urgency. It is an urgency that requires us to find new answers. Perhaps it is not forgiveness but love that will reveal our humanity. But forgiveness opened for us the optimism of possibility, and love offers us the courage to embrace our shared humanity in the pursuit of repair.

Love is not a concept that we often see or read about as central in research on restoration of peace in the face of the violence and its afterlife. One of the most notable exchanges on this question of love occurred between Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin in 1962 when Baldwin, in his “Letter from a Region in My Mind”—later published in his book The Fire Next Time—made a call for love as the only way to interrupt the continuing legacies of history and their transgenerational repercussions. These legacies, marked by the violence of dehumanization and depersonalization of public and social life, ask of us to gather our sense of moral imagination—to approach the larger questions of how to move our humanity forward with the courage of a reparative humanism. This was the approach taken by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC was an effort to imbue public life, and the realms of law and justice with a relational cultural ethics of Ubuntu, the moral foundations of which I consider to be the love of humanity. Ubuntu, as love in action, expands the horizon of what it means to be human. It is a vision that brings those who share in the human community—and invites those afraid to take the risk—into step with each other, and into a spiral movement of human inter- and multi-subjectivity that edges them toward the center of possibility, and then upward toward the apex of a transformation that is transcendent. 

Ubuntu is best captured in my language, isiXhosa, in the expression Umntu ngumntu ngabanye abantu. A close translation of the meaning of this expression is that “A person is a person through being witnessed by, and engaging in reciprocal witnessing of other persons,” or “A person becomes a human being through the multiplicity of relationships with others.” In other words, the richness of subjectivity flows from interconnectedness with the wider community, and from the reciprocal caring and complementarity of human relationships. It is a reciprocity that calls on people to be ethical subjects, able to see others as part of a human community. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu, that warrior of peace and recipient of the Templeton Prize put it, “My humanity caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” Ubuntu as love in action is Other-directed, concerned with forging human links across time and space.

When people encounter one another—even those who are adversaries—innumerable possibilities, both destructive and restorative, and all that cannot be reduced to these categories, may arise. Whether or not people are moved to a shared vision of what the future should be, the potential for the unexpected, unforeseen and thoroughly creative, endemic to the human condition is always present. We must be intentional about this reparative quest, about creating these pockets of possibility in our communities, and in our institutions. This is what I am trying to do in my current work, and I am immensely grateful to the Templeton Foundation Prize for this unique award, which will enable me to keep asking new questions.